The Perfect Book for Lent?

On C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters

I find it very difficult to pick my favourite C. S. Lewis book. I’ve yet to read Narnia - to the dismay of many friends - and Till We Have Faces - which is meant to be brilliant. But of the books I have read, I think The Screwtape Letters might just win out.

My husband recently started reading it out loud to me (this is the second read for both of us), and this time it struck me just how perfect it is for Lent. If you haven’t come across it before, the premise itself is absolutely captivating. The Screwtape Letters is an epistolary novel, meaning that, instead of having a third-person narrator, it consists of fictional letters sent from Screwtape, a senior administrator in the bureaucracy of Hell, to his nephew Wormwood, instructing him on how to tempt humans to act sinfully. Lewis uses this conceit brilliantly as a vehicle for Christian apologetics, so that the novel is as much a literary work, as it is an exploration of various key theological issues. Being on the cusp between theology and literature, it’s no surprise that it appeals to me tremendously.

I could spend a very long time detailing all the reasons why I love The Screwtape Letters, but today I want to focus on the idea of worry. It’s an issue that Lewis seems to go back to time and time again, and no wonder! He wrote SL during World War II, so any mention of worry or fear for the future, would have probably been relatable to its first readers. I know that, as a naturally anxious person, I certain still relate to this now, almost a hundred years later. How is worry a vehicle for sin? Lewis focuses on this question particularly in letters XIV and XV. In letter XIV, Screwtape explains to Wormwood how to utilise a false idea of humility to draw humans away from God. You may have heard of the concept of humility as ‘not thinking of [yourself] at all’ from Lewis’ best-known work of non-fiction, Mere Christianity. But he discusses this very idea in SL, too. Referring to one particular human that Wormwood is trying to tempt, Screwtape suggests to his nephew:

Let him think of [Humility] not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be…By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.

This allows the demons, Screwtape adds, to ‘have the chance of keeping [humans’] minds endlessly revolving on themselves’. God, Screwtape explains, wants man to rejoice in talent and good works, ‘to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents’. He wants us to love good, true, and beautiful things precisely because they are good and true and beautiful, regardless of who created them. But if the devil can get humans to worry that they are not good enough, that they should castigate themselves endlessly for everything they do - all the while making them believe they are being humble - then he can make us self-absorbed, and stop us from exercising the virtue of charity which derives from a true kind of humility.

These ideas are further developed in the next letter, letter XV, where Screwtape explains to Wormwood how worry about the future can be used to lead humans away from God’s eternity. The future, Screwtape argues, is ‘the thing least like eternity’ and ‘the most completely temporal part of time’, because:

Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

So, Screwtape continues, God wants us humans to concern ourselves with the present:

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too - just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present…[God’s] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity…washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.

On the other hand, the devil distracts us with the future:

But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth - ready to break [God’s] commands in the present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other - dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see.

Not worrying about the future, then, doesn’t mean living carelessly of consequences, or not practicing charity out of a notion that all which matters is present pleasure. What it does mean, is that once we have finished our daily labour to the best of our abilities, we should commit things into God’s hands, and trust that his will, will indeed be done.

I find this emphasis on committing things to God incredibly reassuring, especially now that I’m a mother. Since my daughter was born around 3 months ago, I can’t closely watch my toddler’s every little movement like I used to. My attention is divided. I do my best to ensure that they’re both safe, but I also have to accept that I can’t protect them from harm entirely. No parent can, no matter how much we’d like to. So in the evenings, right before I fall asleep, I often pray to God, asking him to keep my children safe during the night, when I don’t have my eyes on them at all times. I’ve often thought of Lewis’ words when doing that. And this Lent, that’s something I want to practice even more. I want to worry less, not because I don’t care enough, or because I don’t think I have to do my part, but rather because, in ther words of my favourite Psalm (127): ‘Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain’.